


Make Like A Tree

by TF Grognon (gloss)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Disaster Human With All The Feelings/Non-Human Friend Who Secretly Adores Him, Dyson tree, Far Future, First time as a couple, Forest Gods, Friends to Lovers, Love Story, M/M, Vines As Tentacles, Xeno, botanical porn, pining goes literal, solarpunk-y
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:00:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27782629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/TF%20Grognon
Summary: As a human disaster and his best friend, a mysterious forest spirit, work to save their small, beloved homeworld, they realize their feelings for each other in the process.Or: maybe home was the plants we made out with along the way.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 11
Kudos: 23
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	Make Like A Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nununununu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/gifts).



> One characterization detail was lifted, with permission, from a friend's fic. I'll edit in the author and link after the anon period is over.

A man bursts out the door of the small cabin, hopping as he pulls on his boot. When that's accomplished, he runs faster, arms pumping, down the steep, curving path toward the cluster of community buildings and market stalls.

When he arrives at the common, he is sweaty-faced and breathless. He plants his hands on his knees, bending over, but trying to talk at the same time. What comes out is a grammatical wheeze. His cloud of dark, woolly hair is flattened on one side; the many rings in his ears catch the ambient light and glitter.

"They went to eat," an older woman tells him as she passes.

"But the tour!" he protests. "I'm supposed to —"

"Can't lead a tour when you're late picking up the tourists, can you?"

He scowls — the expression twists oddly on his round face, as if it doesn't belong there and rarely visits — as he straightens up. "Where'd they go to eat?"

Over her shoulder, she says, "Where else?"

He wipes his hand over his forehead, then pats ineffectually at his hair. He tugs at his tunic, wiggling a little as if to get comfortable, before setting out across the common to a series of open-air stalls.

The stalls are arranged in a narrow arcade. At the far end, the aisle ends at a triple-wide stall with small tables and chairs scattered out front and around the sides. The settlement commissary serves four meals a day; there's a tavern on the side.

The visitors are easy to spot. Unlike the locals in their drab, soft linen and wool garments, who mill around in friendly, ever-shifting groups, the visitors wear crisply-tailored, bright clothes and sit at a single table apart from the rest. They watch the locals with frank interest.

"Welcome, welcome!" In front of their table, the man plants his hands on his hips and throws out his chest. He uses the booming voice of your favorite coach or teacher. "This —" He sweeps one arm in an arc, taking in both the common and the forest behind. "— is Zellenmeer! We're so happy you came!"

Eyes narrowing in an already sharp face, one visitor half-rises from their seat. "Tamayo Méndez?"

He nods vigorously. "That's me. Consider me your envoy, emissary, errand boy, tireless dogsbody and font of useful, illuminating information during what we hope will be your _very_ fruitful visit."

"You're late," the visitors' leader says, settling back down in their seat. "Inconceivably rude. We're of half a mind to take the next shuttle back home."

Tamayo's wide, friendly grin falters. "You can't do that."

Another visitor arches a thin eyebrow. "Can't we?"

Tamayo drops to a crouch before their table. "Please. Hear us out. I apologize for my rudeness. That's no reflection on this wonderful place, I assure you —"

"You represent Zellenmeer, do you not?"

"Yeah, but -" He ducks his head, rubbing the back of his neck. When he looks up, his entire expression and posture are beseeching. "We need you. All of us."

"That much," the leader says flatly, "has been obvious from the very start."

Tamayo laughs, then frowns, catching himself. "I'm new at this."

"You don't say."

***

A year or so before this disastrous meeting, Tamayo might as well be a different man. He has a job he loves, a best friend within arm's reach nearly all the time, and a community he adores. He teaches in the colony's lower school. He romps with the kids, helps them with numbers, glyphs, and colors, shows them basic decency skills, and gets them started reading and telling their own stories. He can't think of a better way to spend his days, so if his nights are frequently lonely once he and his friend Jack say goodnight, he can handle that. Romance isn't as much of a priority when everything else feels so right.

Then the council goes and decides to close the lower school. 

Zellenmeer has seen better days. Much better days, and many more of them. Nowadays, it's a quarter of the size it was at its height and far quieter. 

Jack would say the colony is in decline, except that the term makes Tamayo scowl and complain. The glass beads that had made the colony's name are no longer produced; the large-scale workshop that used to be at the center of the settlement closed two decades ago. Some small collections are still produced, but only occasionally, at home by some of the oldest residents. Something like three people move away for every new arrival, and those new arrivals tend to be older. There just aren't enough children to justify running the school as it is organized.

***

On their last day together, Tamayo leads the children off a well-maintained cobblestone path and onto a dirt trail that curves up into the forest. He's carrying the youngest on his back, and the little guy's hold around Tamayo's throat is starting to make breathing difficult. The two eight year olds, hand in hand, clamber past him, making for the trail up to the falls.

"Slow down!" he calls croakily after them. 

"Kids," the eldest, eleven-year-old Vura says with all the world-weary resignation of a centenarian. "So irresponsible."

"They're not so bad," Tamayo replies after shifting little Reedin upward and relieving the pressure on his windpipe. 

Vura sighs deeply. When he pats her shoulder, she leans against him, just for a moment. He hugs her one-armed, then grabs Reedin before he can slip all the way off.

"Today sucks," Vura says after a bit. Behind them, the rest of her cohort, all four of them, shout as they debate the merits of various professional sports stars.

"Does it?" Tamayo asks. He fights to keep his voice cheerful.

He can hear the rolled eyes in her tone. "Uh, yes? Worst day ever."

"Ever-ever in history or ever in your whole life?"

She's a smart kid and takes some time to think that over. "Definitely my whole life," she says. "No question. But maybe in history, too."

They've reached the top of the trail. The waterfall can be heard now, a deeper rustle than that of wind through the leaves. Tamayo and Reedin sit on a large outcropping to wait for the others to catch up while Vura crouches to watch a caterpillar.

"I think there's probably been much worse days," Tamayo tells her. "We just don't know, because we're in this one."

She huffs out a breath and doesn't deign to respond further.

"There's no war on," he continues, "no one's sick or dying."

"We're dying," she mutters, but doesn't look up.

"Vura," he says. "Come on."

"Well, we are." She brushes off her knees as she stands, then takes a few steps back down the trail to yell at the others. "Hurry up, people!"

"Things are changing," Tamayo says. "Not dying."

"Whatever." Vura turns and heads toward the waterfall. "Same difference."

"But it's not, it's —" He gives up. The hunch to her shoulders tells him, from long experience, that she's done listening. When she's ready, she'll approach him again. Besides, he's having a hard time believing his own words anyway. _Change_ sure feels a hell of a lot like dying.

The four stragglers finally appear. The tallest of them, nine-year-old Ling, demands, "What are we doing here?" 

"What's the surprise?" one of his companions chimes in.

"Is there food? There better be food!"

Tamayo slides down to his feet, Reedin in hand, and gestures toward the waterfall until they're all walking ahead of him. 

"Thought we'd make today special," he says, as the noise of the water grows louder. "Since it's our last day together, I thought we'd have school outside."

"Uh," Ling groans. "We almost always have school outside."

"Yeah," Vura agrees. "Grimebug here is right. For once."

Ling pushes her — not hard, just for the principle of the thing. "Don't call me that!"

"Why not? It's —"

"Hey, quiet!" Tamayo says, loud and clear, then repeats himself twice until they've all shut up. "Thanks. I thought you liked going outside?"

"But it's not _special_ ," Vura notes. She's going to make an excellent lawyer someday. "It's what we nearly always do."

Tamayo knuckles his temple and says, "That's why it'd be nice to end like always."

"And you claim you aren't sentimental," a man's voice says over the water's noise. 

Watching the kids look up to the very edge of the waterfall, Tamayo grins. A sunbeam, dappled into shards by the forest canopy, brightens and draws back together; the air around the spot ripples like the surface of rapids, darkening and greening, before the light and air condense and elongate, producing the shape of a very tall man, entirely green in skin and hair — a three-dimensional image of man made from leaf and moss, lichen and root.

"Jack!" Vura shouts, scrambling up the steep bank. Ling and the two girls are right behind her. "You came!"

"Told you it was a special day," Tamayo says, but no one's listening to him any more. "And I never claimed not to be sentimental, that's just outright slander."

The kids are ringing the green man, tugging on his mossy clothes, trying to climb a smooth-barked leg. Over their riot, he catches Tamayo's eye and smiles.

*

"Thank you," Tamayo says to Jack later that evening. The children have long since returned home and he has eaten at the community commissary. Now he's back home, a large bottle of ale dangling in his fingers. "For today. The kids can be...a lot."

"Glad to do it," Jack says from above him. The leaves rustle and a branch twangs as he speaks, so low that only Tamayo's mind hears.

Tamayo picks at one of his cuticles. "I know people aren't your thing."

"Eh," Jack puts in. "People as a rule? No, not really. _Your_ people? Sure."

Tamayo sighs as he leans back against the trunk-wall. His cabin is nestled against the trunk of one of the moon's tallest, oldest trees. It might even be one of the original habitat-creation trees that turned this rock into a livable moon.

"You're a good friend," Tamayo murmurs. His eyes are closed, his voice thick. "Fuck."

"What's wrong?"

"Really going to miss those kids." He sniffles wetly and swipes at his eyes.

Before he falls fully asleep, Jack shoots down a long tendril to rescue the bottle from tipping out of his hand. The tendril sets the bottle safely aside, then tugs Tamayo's overshirt closed over his exposed collarbone. It brushes lightly up Tamayo's cheek before adjusting his shirt lapels again, this time more snugly.

It gets cold out here in the dark.

***

People wouldn't still be alive had it not been for the plants that sheltered and sustained them in their flight from the dead Earth. It is not a reciprocal relationship, however.

Jack remembers everything that happened, from the first tentative bloom in a lab that is now light-millennia far away through the seeding of the asteroids and then the long journeys out into the dark. He remembers, too, what happened upon arrival.

That's just the way his memory works, at the level of light/dark, sugar/carbon. His memories, like the rest of his mind, flicker at the tips of root hairs and pulse deep at the xylem core. They whip around fungal filaments and spread, wide and thirsty, to bask in light. 

The departure project captured an entire belt of asteroids. The rocks were tested for structural stability, hollowed out where possible, then seeded with genetically-modified specialty plants. The green grew out in every direction, sealing up the rocks, admitting and magnifying starlight but trapping both warmth and the breathable oxygen. The plants created their own greenhouse. The green formed both external envelope and interior architecture — long, bowed boles inside, chambering the bored-out space and flexible, sensitive leaf-cover outside. Other parts of the habitat plant grew inside as soft, densely-matted mosses.

When the green had become self-sustaining, with an atmosphere and rudimentary warmth, surveyors and engineers arrived and finished the rocks' transformation into fully-livable habitats. Then the colonists arrived.

The asteroids were subjected to controlled gravitational manipulation, coming together only to be flung outwards by a massive burst of applied energy. Behind them, as they sailed through the dark, lit by their destination star, they left the smoking cinders of the old ways.

As the journey progressed, the green continued to develop. The departure project genetically modified bristlecone pine, sugi and Nootka cypress with enhanced mycorrhizal fungi and bracken to create the habitat plant. Amid all the positive benefits — hardiness, longevity, and architectural sweep — other qualities snuck in. The sori by which bracken develops and releases spores proved inconvenient; the scent of decay given off by the secondary leaf growth was regrettable. Other unexpected qualities remained hidden: a dreamy tendency toward lyric poetry of the nootka, for instance, as well as a penchant for a new calculus, demonstrated by the Lobarion cyanobacterium.

Something else, something old and clever, had also slipped into the genetic splicing and tailoring. Along with endothermic leaves and tough-yet-flexible buttressing boles, the green displayed rudimentary sentience. It had opinions, strong ones, which it enforced.

Those passengers who harassed the habitat plants, through vandalism or neglect, experienced a disproportionate number of injuries and ailments, including concussions, broken bones, and raging allergic reactions immune to the stock of antihistamines. More strikingly, those who harmed other humans almost invariably came to bad ends. Committing rape and murder, as well as assaulting children and the elderly almost always ended with the guilty party choked to death by vines or drawn into the forest, never to return. 

Consultation among the rocks during the journey was difficult, but necessary in this case. Each and every one reported similar events in the depths of their greenery. The first colony that reported it called it "the fierce spirit" and the name stuck.

While in transit, the fierce spirits' sense of justice prevailed. The humans could hardly get rid of the very thing that kept them alive. Moreover, they didn't know _what_ the fierce spirit was, where it might be located, let alone how to disable it.

The people remained respectful so long as they were dependent on the green. Once the rocks had arrived, they conglomerated their colonies and deployed non-organic life-support technologies. Such changes were for the better, nearly everyone agreed. Far more was under their control now.

Some people, across a few colonies, disagreed. They remained unaffiliated with the others and orbited the central megacolony planet as moons. They were considered harmless, if eccentric. Even nowadays when they travel to the central megacol, they're believed to be callow and gullible, the objects of mockery if not outright exploitation.

When the colony rocks reached their destination and implanted themselves in the featureless terrain of the megacolony planet, most killed their green hosts. They simply slashed and burned every plant they could find, reasoning that the fierce spirits could hardly survive if there was nowhere to go.

Jack wasn't present for any of these memories but he recalls the events perfectly. Most of the fierce spirits, caught by surprise, too slow to escape angry animals and further immobilized by the shock of betrayal, were slaughtered where they stood. Cut off from light, from the rest of the living whole, they dried and crisped, darkened into ash, eventually dispersed, unnoticed, like so much moondust.

Some spirits escaped, fleeing to the few colony rocks that had not turned on their hosts. They made the jump, across space, in cold dark, out of desperation. Some even made it. There they entwined with their siblings and relatives, massed into enormous, shuddering green composites. Later generations called these grief-mosses, which, while not entirely accurate, _was_ evocative. They withdrew into the company of their own kind, leaving murderous humans to their own devices. Their vegetative processes persisted — exhaling oxygen, wielding light to smash apart carbon and water into sugar, hoarding carbon, tickling out other nutrients from the soil.

That soil they'd made themselves: it was nothing if not generations of their shed leaves and fallen branches decaying and changing with the underlying rock. 

(There was another important ingredient in the dirt, of course, but for various reasons, no one, even Tamayo, wants to linger on it. That was the contribution made by deceased human passengers, as well as their animals. Humans are surprisingly touchy — precisely in that superstitious animal way that makes Jack, among others, so impatient — about their own remains.)

Once the green's fierce spirits withdrew, they were not heard from again.

All of this may sound like a recapitulation of humanity's history on its first planet. That may or may not be the case — Jack remembers Earth as he remembers other events and sites. The memories dwell inside him, as experiences of light and sugar, filth and shadow, shifting temperatures and variable brightness. He does not trade in allegory, however. He'd be hard put to define the term, even within the privacy of his own mind. Abstraction and comparison are fairly simple, but telling stories about one thing by talking about another merely frustrates him. If one wants to talk about **X** , why not simply do that?

Tamayo has tried to explain, even demonstrate, some of the strengths of metaphor and allegory, but Jack remains immune to their charms, not to mention outright doubtful of their usefulness.

"That's okay," Tamayo says. They're hanging out on the roof of Tamayo's cabin late one night. There's a small ceramic kalian at Tamayo's side. He has offered, for years now, to exhale into one of Jack's xylem dimples, but Jack has yet to take him up on that. "I'm not very good at them, either. Metaphor, I mean."

"You talk indirectly and narratively all the time."

"Sure, okay, but —" Smiling a little, Tamayo gets a distant look in his eyes. He's thinking over what he wants to say, evaluating it, determining whether or not it's worth sharing. "That's not always on purpose and it's usually messy."

"You are very messy," Jack agrees. "Almost impressively so."

"How dare you," Tamayo says flatly, his eyes crinkling up as he grins. "The very idea. I've never been so insulted."

Animals, as a rule, are messy. They waste so much energy moving around, regulating their temperature, searching for and then devouring food, only to excrete it in stinking piles and go off in search of more food. Or sex. Possibly both, simultaneously.

Tamayo, however, is a different sort of mess. All of the above applies, but for some incomprehensible reason, Jack doesn't mind those qualities in Tamayo. What makes Tamayo messy is his exuberance, his stubbornness, the thunder of his excitement as well as the small, scattered whispers of his sorrows.

***

They met when Tamayo was eleven, running to hide from his older cousins. After his parents' death, he'd moved to Zellenmeer a few weeks earlier. Since he was new here, he'd never heard the stories about the forest. He saw an old, disused bridge reaching up into the green, and he ran up it. Soon enough, the shouts of his cousins fell away, and all he heard was his own breath thundering against the sharp calls of birds and the constant murmur of the breeze.

The path was steep as it led off the swaying bridge, rocky and overgrown with the same moss that also draped off the tree limbs all around him. They crowded the narrow path, looming over it while their knobby roots cut perpendicularly across and among its rocks.

Tamayo's foot caught in one root and he pitched forward, landing with his hands and face in the undergrowth, his knees and feet still on the path. Panting, eyes welling with tears for the first time since the funeral, he looked around. Everything was a blur, green on green, throbbing in time with the pain in his foot.

One hand was clutching a sharp rock; he let it go, but a clump of moss remained stuck to his palm. It was misshapen, a squashed ball.

Tamayo cupped the moss ball in both hands and looked it over. It trembled at his touch, shuddered when he breathed, but when he went to lower it back to the ground, it rolled awkwardly up his wrist, tiny tendrils inching out to cling to his pores.

That tickled, and he laughed. The moss ball expanded at the sound of his laughter, puffing up and out. It wiggled a little, back and forth, so he laughed some more.

"That's it, that's the whole story," Tamayo always says when someone asks how he and Jack met. "One pushy plant tugs at my follicles and I was a lifer."

"A goner," Jack corrects. "A lifer is something else."

"Lifer. Stuck in one place for life? That's me," Tamayo retorts. He grins and Jack's foliage shifts and rustles; whomever they're talking to usually has no idea what they're doing.

It was a lot more complicated than that, of course. Tamayo's aunt tried, several times, to get him to put the moss ball back in the forest. She was traditional, and knew well the stories of what happened to those who harassed or threatened the green.

"I'm not harassing him!" Tamayo protested then, and, when he tells the story, his voice takes on the squeaky indignation of an eleven year old whose honor has been gravely insulted. "He's my _friend_."

That much was true. The moss slept with Tamayo, unfurled into a loose bundle of fronds and lying across his throat; in the daylight, it rode in the collar of his shirt, a few tendrils sunk deep in the weave, as they ran, explored, climbed and played. When school came into session, it accompanied him there, too.

Other children took little notice of Tamayo's friend. Some adults in the community objected to its presence in school — some, like his aunt, retained traditional fearful respect, while others considered the moss ball a symbol of old-fashioned superstition, even anti-humanist irrationality. As such, it didn't belong in a "place for learning".

The council came to a stalemate on the issue and could not make a ruling. When Tamayo and his aunt offered to keep the friend out of sight, the proposition was accepted as the best possible compromise. 

"This way," Tamayo whispered to Jack — they'd decided on the name after months of debate — "you'll always be where you want. I promise."

***

When the school closes, Tamayo is, to put it kindly, at a loss. He sleeps a lot, avoids everyone but Jack, puts on extra weight around his middle, drinks and indulges too much in the mildly psychoactive sugarbriar leaf.

Eventually, the council finds something new for Tamayo to do: Resettlement Director, also known as New Citizen Recruiter. (The council cannot come to consensus on the title.) He's tasked with convincing people to move to Zellenmeer, preferably in groups.

If the population doesn't start rebounding, everyone knows what's next. They'll need to affiliate with one of the other independent moons or, worse case scenario, drop out of orbit to agglomerate with the megacol.

***

Tamayo's first set of visitors leave on the evening shuttle. They are not impressed by his attempts at bonhomie, nor his sincere apologies. He sees them off, bemused by their determination to take offense, then returns to the common in time for the evening meal. 

There, distracted by questions from various passersby, he takes five yeast rolls, a large cup of tea, and some boiled seafowl eggs. He stops for a moment, scanning the small crowd, before finding Jack — he's just a different texture in the dusk's shadows, easily mistaken for another tree or tall shrub.

Tamayo's beaming as he jogs over. When he sinks down next to Jack, he's already talking. When he pauses for breath, Jack pokes a twig at the pile of rolls. "Nicely balanced dinner you've got there."

Tamayo blinks down at his plate. "I just sort of grabbed whatever."

"Every night," Jack says. "Every meal. Your attention span is like a gnat's."

"Nah," Tamayo replies, then pauses to think about it. "Frequently? Often. Not _every_ night, though, that'd be..."

"Every night."

"You're not here every night."

"Ah, but I've got eyes everywhere."

Rocking slowly back and forth, Tamayo knocks his shoulder against Jack's trunk. "So creepy, man, you know that?"

"Hardly," Jack says. "Just the truth."

Tamayo makes a noncommittal noise before biting into a roll and washing it down with tea. The crowd for the meal has thinned out, and he's sitting half-turned away from the rest, so it's finally getting quiet.

"Feel like you'd have to work pretty hard to make a meal _that_ random, and yet—" Jack presses.

"I do it effortlessly," Tamayo finishes for him and grins widely. "What can I say? It's a niche talent, but it's what I've got."

"Your one true strength?"

"Exactly."

"You've got more to offer than chaotic meals," Jack tells him. 

"Yeah? Like what?"

They're staring at each other, daring each other to crack a grin. "Give me a moment," Jack says, "I'll come up with something."

"Take all the time you need."

"You're very energetic," Jack says at last.

"Hyperactive?"

"You said it, not me."

"Huh." Tamayo reclines on the chilly grass, leaning on one elbow. His muscular legs are crossed at the ankles, the one on top twitching and waving as if practicing dance steps. "What else?"

"What else what?"

"What else do I have to offer?"

Jack lies down and stares up at the sky. "I have to come up with something else?"

Tamayo chuckles a little but doesn't say anything. His profile looks bluish, irregular, thanks to the lanterns swinging around the serving area. 

"You're funny," Jack says. "And not too hard on the old visual receptors."

Tamayo rolls onto his side, propping his head in his hand. "Are you complimenting my looks, pal?"

Jack blinks a few times before replying. "Yeah, guess I am."

"Ha," Tamayo breathes, one corner of his mouth curving up. "Sucker."

Jack snorts and holds out one arm, letting it unfurl and extend, what were fingers trailing out into tendrils. "Hardly."

The tips of the miniature vines dance over Tamayo's shoulder and the seam in his jumper. When one grazes his bare neck, he ducks and giggles.

"These are suckers," Jack concludes, twisting his limb so that everything snaps back into humanoid form. "Get it straight."

"Straight," Tamayo echoes, grinning again, "is not something I'm all that familiar with."

Jack groans at the attempted pun and flops onto his dorsal side. "Stop it."

"My talent for wordplay cannot be contained."

"Don't make me —"

"What?" Tamayo leans in, grinning like a fool. "Make like a tree and —"

Jack claps a large, oval leaf across Tamayo's open mouth. "Please. Spare me."

Laughing, Tamayo mumbles something incoherent. His breath is warm and damp against the underside of the leaf.

***

"Tamayo!" A young woman calls across the common. "Hey! Tamayo!"

She was one of his students. 

It takes him a few moments to recognize her. It's been several years, and he last saw her when she was all of seven years old, so the chubby, smiling person hugging him hard is nearly a stranger.

"Zillie!" Her name comes back to him at last. She'd always been the smallest of her class, her high-pitched voice and indefatigable stamina making up for what she lacked in physical size. "You got tall!"

Laughing, she shakes out her hair. "It was bound to happen at some point."

He squeezes her hand in both of his. "What brings you home?" A frown slips across her face, so he adds, "Back, I mean. What brings you back?"

"Grandma," she says. "She's moving down with us! Got to get her packed up."

Her grandmother, like her parents before her, was born here. She used to maintain the ansible office when Tamayo was a kid. He had no idea she was leaving. That makes three households already this season.

"But you should come visit!" Zillie adds brightly. "There's so much more to do down on the surface."

"Eh," Tamayo says, shoving his hands into his pockets. He swallows, determined not to let his sadness show. "I like a slower pace, you know?"

"Don't take it too slow," she says by way of farewell. "Before you know it, it'll be —"

The rest is inaudible; he's turned and is moving away already. Where the initial exhilaration at seeing an old student had been, there's just a little more scratchy, rasping sadness.

An hour later, carrying lunch and beverages, he knocks on the grandmother's door and offers to help with the packing. He can't do anything about his sadness, but he refuses to let it overcome him. In the meantime, an elder could use another pair of hands.

***

By the time a third group of prospective citizens visits Zellenmeer, Tamayo thinks he's gotten pretty good at his salesmanship. He meets their shuttle, treats them to breakfast on the common, then gives them a tour of the former workshops, which now feature holo-streams of significant moments in Zellenmeer history and culture.

"All right!" he says this morning as they finish eating breakfast. He looks around, grinning and nodding. He didn't wrestle little kids and teach them glyphs for twelve years without picking up a few tricks of the voice and smile. "So glad you're here. I've got a lot planned, but, trust me, there's some fun built in, too."

"What sort of fun?" asks a short, thin person with shaggy silver hair and close-set dark eyes. 

"Nothing strenuous," he replies. "I'd like you to get a sense of the whole community, of what we're like as —"

"Yes, yes, very quaint," the woman says. She looks around, eyes wide, then leans in as if sharing a confidence. "And what about the dryad?"

Tamayo tries very hard to keep sounding friendly. "Sorry, the what?" 

"The _dryad_? We will see it, yes?"

Tamayo takes a step back. "Him. And, I dunno. Maybe? Depends."

"We want to see it."

"Him," Tamayo says again. She starts to say something else, but he interrupts her. "He's a citizen. Not an exhibit."

Her companion slides his arm around her shoulders. "Of course, of course. But you must know it is the main attraction —"

Tamayo sets off for the workshop, calling over his shoulder. When in doubt, ignore the troublemaker. "First we'll do a little cultural tour! Then a hike!"

They don't give up. They ask each citizen they meet about the monster in the woods, whether they've seen it, if it's as fearsome as rumored. Tamayo's head is pounding by lunch time; he wants to shout at them to shut up, to drop it, to get the fuck off his moon, but he can't say any of those things. He keeps smiling and ignoring them and repeating the sales spiel until he feels less sincere — certainly less convincing — than a bargain-basement holo-carnie.

When he got this job, the council praised his people skills, particularly his ability to get along with just about anyone. By mid-afternoon, Tamayo can hardly remember ever liking another human being, ever.

"I get you now," he tells Jack that evening. He's half-soused on sugarbriar leaf, giggly, then morose, then giggly again. He throws open his arms. "Take me with you into the woods. Hide me away from assholes and stupid people and _everyone_!"

"You're being very loud," Jack replies.

"Take me, big green pal! Make me your, what's it called? Sproutlet. Spore-chum. Fiddlehead me til I can't see straight!"

"Go to sleep."

Tamayo flops onto his belly and rubs his face against the grass. "No."

"Sleep it off, messy guy."

" _You_ go to sleep."

Jack pokes him with a woody twig, several times. "I don't sleep."

"Lucky," Tamayo says, rolling onto his back, then pulling himself up until he's sitting with his arms around his drawn-up knees. He chews his lip for a long time, and fiddles with a short twist sprouting from his beard. "I hate people."

"No, you don't."

"I kinda do."

"Well," Jack says, unrolling a limber vine to help pull Tamayo to his feet, then propel him toward home. "That will pass, I'm sure."

When Tamayo looks up into the canopy, squinting, a worried line cutting down between his brows, Jack goes still.

"I don't know what to do," Tamayo says, so quietly it's barely more than breath.

"It's okay," Jack tells him, in a small green pulse of thought and reassurance. "We'll figure it out."

***

No one knows where Jack came from. Jack might know, but if he does, that knowledge is the deep kind, sunk into his bast tissue and nearly impossible to verbalize. And, further, even if he does know, he's not about to share the truth with just anyone.

He knows where he is. He doesn't need to know more than that, nor does Tamayo.

He can slip from green growth to green growth, move at will from tree trunk to the finest roothair and then to an epiphyte tangled in the overstory meters up. He's everywhere, and nowhere, all the time.

They first realized he could communicate and report from great distances when Tamayo fell in the river and hit his head on a rock. Jack nearly flew from the algae in the river to the woody limb of a tree, then from leaf tip to leaf tip until he found Tamayo's aunt at work in her garden.

He spoke to her through the trumpet of one of her prize flowers. Afterward, she made him promise never to do that again; the blossom was never the same.

Tamayo and Jack tested his capabilities as often as they could. Only Tamayo could hear Jack telepathically, which made things easier. He's clearest within the confines of Zellenmeer itself. Outside of it, he runs the risk of encountering other intelligences in the green, none of whom have ever been remotely friendly.

***

Tamayo thinks, sometimes, that Jack might be a composite, something like a lichen, just writ large and metaphysical. During the colonies' flight, it was not unusual for unwanted infants to be left in the woods — "given to the green", it was called. Depending on your perspective, the baby was either sacrificed to the greengods or abandoned by panicked family.

What if, Tamayo likes to speculate, a ghost of one of those babies got adopted and integrated by one of the greengods? The result very well could be someone like Jack, able to think and talk and _look_ human, but still green, still different.

He hasn't shared this speculation with too many other people. He wouldn't want someone talking about their theories of _him_ to others, that's for sure. Of those he has told, only his aunt thought the idea had any merit. Puno said he was daydreaming, projecting his own biography onto Jack, just making himself more powerful. His tutor at university said it all sounded like a hokey fairy tale, not even serious enough to qualify as folk religion.

He's never told Jack his thoughts about this. The need to explain and classify is all too human, which annoys Jack immeasurably.

***

Tamayo is usually late, often breathless, nearly always disheveled in some way — hair, beard, clothes. Handsome and vital as he is, he never manages to be fully pulled together. 

He expects a lot of himself. This surprises many people, whose initial impression of him is that he's friendly, even exuberant, but terribly distracted and disorganized. But he is that way, Jack knows well, because he's taken responsibility for so much. He tries to get as much accomplished as three or four regular people.

All of this was true when he was teaching. Now, however, he seems to have left "cheerfully disheveled" behind. These days, he can come off as manic, hollow-cheeked, baggy-eyed.

"The Veeregheans backed out," Tamayo announces as he arrives at breakfast. 

"I'm sorry," Jack says. The words aren't remotely adequate for how he feels. They're _accurate_ , to the letter, but not adequate.

"It'll be fine," Tamayo says, both automatically and a little distractedly as he's firing up two different datafeeds and scanning the streams. 

"No," Jack says.

Startled, Tamayo glances up. "It will be —"

"— no, I mean, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."

"— it has to be fine, so it will be —. Wait, what?"

They _were_ talking over each other. Now no one's talking. From feast to famine, noise to silence, no signal to be found.

Blinking rapidly, Tamayo tilts his head and circles his hand, telling Jack to continue. Jack, however, does the same, so the silence stretches on.

"Right, okay," Tamayo says at last and turns back to his data streams.

***

The next set of visitors comes from one of the megacol's ocean regions. They like Zellenmeer's humidity, remarking several times on how homey and welcoming it is, but cannot seem to reconcile themselves to the "excess" of greenery and undeveloped land, let alone the admittedly idiosyncratic collective economy.

"I really thought we had a chance with them," Tamayo says. "Who wouldn't want to get away from crashing waves and constantly getting drenched in brine?"

"Not them, it would seem," Jack replies.

"Guess not." Tamayo tugs at a twist in his beard, then rolls it between thumb and forefinger as he stares into the middle distance. "Starting to think some of these visitors are sightseeing. Just in it for the paid vacation."

"Starting?"

"Yeah, starting. Why?"

"Nothing," Jack says, then cannot help himself. "I thought it was obvious."

"Not to me," Tamayo mutters and slips downward, crossing his arms. "Shit."

"It's not a bad thing," Jack tries to point out. "You never know what might stick with someone. You never know who that someone might be. Better to keep trying, right, than to —"

"I'm such an idiot!"

"Not really."

"Obvious, huh? It's been obvious this whole time but I'm just going around like an optimistic _idiot_ and no one thought, hey, maybe we should let Tamayo in on a huge embarrassing secret here..."

"No one's laughing at you."

Tamayo mutters childishly, "You don't know that."

"I'm not laughing at you," Jack says. 

"Of course you're not, I didn't mean to accuse you." Tamayo sounds tortured now, well and truly overwrought and flailing. "Fuck, I didn't mean _you_."

For a moment, Jack feels vaguely insulted, as if Tamayo believes him truly incapable of being hurtful, of hurting him. Why should that belief bother him? It's a compliment, isn't it? Or is it just an oversight? _Of course not Jack, he barely even counts._

"And I'd notice if someone was," Jack adds, ignoring the spike of worry. "So there's also that."

"But would you tell me?"

"If someone's laughing at you?"

"Yeah."

Tamayo looks up at Jack, his eyes wide and dark, his beard even scragglier than usual. He could be holding his breath, or maybe that's just the quiet tension of the moment.

"Do you want me to?"

Tamayo shrugs, then blinks and looks away. "Maybe, I dunno."

"If it was important," Jack says, "I would. If it was just someone being obnoxious, what would be the point?"

Nodding slowly, then a little faster, Tamayo starts to smile. "That sounds good."

"Okay," Jack says, still perplexed but relieved that Tamayo's dark mood seems to be passing. "It's a deal."

***

At the next general council meeting, the shouts can be heard all the way up at the spaceport platform as well as beyond the river.

Tamayo bursts through the open entrance, stamping down the old porch. It shakes under his passage; he jumps off the narrow side and stalks up into the forest, muttering to himself as he goes.

The light from the entry slices a golden wedge into the darkness.

***

"They say they're on-board! They agree with me! Our goals are the same! And then they go and, and..." Sagging, Tamayo slides down the wall, until he's sitting and drawing his knees up to his chest. "They undercut every damn thing we're working for! Nitpick and second-guess and 'oh, I'm not so sure about _that_...' and by the time we're finished, we've made, literally, negative progress!"

"It can't be that bad."

His eyes are wide, his mouth twisted, when Tamayo looks up. "It's worse. It is that bad. It's terrible. Laina and Zoot want the whole charter revisited, revised, and re-voted on."

In surprise, Jack drops several old leaves. They're so dry they click as they hit the stepping stones.

"Yeah," Tamayo says softly. "Exactly."

They remain quiet for a long time. At some point, Tamayo murmurs, "Why are people like this?"

Jack doesn't need to answer.

"Wish I knew," Tamayo adds after a long pause. "Why don't I do better?"

He's always asked questions like this. He's never found any satisfactory answer; he will, Jack knows, keep on asking until he's out of breath, blue in the face, deep in the grave. Not only does he truly _need_ to know, he seems determined to keep asking. It's the question of people's decency, and of his own capacity to compensate, hopes caught as possibilities, rather than an expectation that they exist, that drives him. 

"You do well," Jack says. "You know you do."

"No, I don't. I do a shitty job at everything. Everything just gets worse, every time, always."

He's still speaking softly, phrases coming out like broken pieces of much larger thoughts. His head is down, chin resting on his chest, his shoulders flexing as he breathes. Jack stirs a little, slides a vine down to brush across the back of Tamayo's head, the nape of his neck. Tamayo shivers, then tips his head to expose his neck better. He's holding his breath; it only comes out, slow and leaky, when Jack's touch stills.

"Thanks," Tamayo says, more quietly than ever.

"Any time," Jack tells him and means it.

***

No one argues that Zellenmeer is not dwindling. The point of contention s what to do about that. Tamayo's determined not to let it disappear. He thinks he might be alone in that.

Only Jack seems to understand what Tamayo's talking about and why it's so important.

"We can't be fighting. We need..."

"Cooperation and mutual support?"

"Yeah, that," Tamayo says hoarsely. He gets an impression from Jack of fungal hyphae, quivering in the pockets between grains of dirt, coaxing out nutrients and sending them along to whoever needs them most. " _That_ , exactly. Can you maybe...beam that into everyone's head one night?" 

When Jack shudders at the very thought, Tamayo shrugs. "I know you can't. It'd be wrong. It's just..."

"You wish there were an easier way."

"Essentially, yes." He squints, chews his lower lip. "That's wrong, isn't it?"

"Not for me to say."

"But if it _was_ for you to say..."

"It's not going to happen."

"Yeah," Tamayo agrees. "I'm just. I'm running out of ideas."

Jack doesn't say anything. Part of that is because he doesn't know what to say.

A larger reason, however, is that he is tempted. He'd give just anything to help Tamayo here: not because he bears any unique goodwill to Zellenmeer, but because Tamayo asked. If Jack could easily smooth away the frown from Tamayo's face, remove the worry slumping his shoulders and roughening his voice, he would. He knows he would.

But he can't tell people what to think. Can't, and won't.

Laina and Zoot, Tamayo's opponents on the council, want to affiliate with another moon in decline, then descend to the megacol and aggregate. They maintain that this is the only way forward, the only choice for Zellenmeer's survival.

But that process means Zellenmeer will _not_ survive. The name might persist, though even that is doubtful, but the rock itself, its generations of residents, all its history and all its green, will be over. As a province in the megacolony, it will be Zellenmeer in name, or memory, only. 

It won't be the place where winter dawn breaks rapidly in sharp shafts of light through the fog, nor the moon that became briefly famous for its citizens' work with native minerals into glass beads. It won't be the community that welcomed Tamayo when he'd lost everything, nor the forest that sprouted and nurtured Jack.

Those aspects of Zellenmeer, Laina and Zoot argue, are personal, sentimental, utterly _trivial_. Assuming a brave, martyred stance, they refuse to let an entire community fade and vanish because one man can't seem to let go of the past and think beyond his own feelings.

That accusation bothers Tamayo deeply. He can't speak to other people's experiences, after all, but only his own. How else is he supposed to get others to think about what Zellenmeer means to them, if not with personal examples?

There must be some way to communicate with her, and those who agree with her. They insist on abstractions and projections, numbers that dwindle and money that disappears. He doesn't know their language. They reduce him to spluttering, shouting, sulking. The more upset he gets, the better he proves their every point. 

"You won't give up," Jack says when Tamayo has calmed down.

"I should," Tamayo replies.

"But you won't."

"No, probably not. I'm too —"

"Stubborn."

"Stupid and sentimental."

"You make those sound like bad things," Jack murmurs.

Tamayo laughs, then, finally.

***

Laina convinces the council to contact the regional association for advice on affiliation and agglomeration. This is the first step toward abandoning their status and descending to the surface.

After yelling himself voiceless, both at the meeting and in the commissary, Tamayo wakes the next morning feeling strangely calm and determined.

"I just need to try harder," he tells Jack. "I can do that."

"Harder than you have been?"

"Yeah. Way harder." He nods so vigorously that all his earrings click together.

"I don't think that's possible."

Tamayo grins, just for a moment, then ducks his head. "I have to try."

Jack tries to understand urgency. Tamayo is desperate, often half-panicked, as time to save Zellenmeer runs short. But time for Jack isn't a countable, consumable quality. There's nothing in his experience to help him understand _running short_. It is bright, then it's dark, then bright again: time is a long, twisting vine that flowers then sleeps, reaches for the light, withdraws into itself in the dark.

He doesn't envy Tamayo his urgency, that much is certain.

***

Tamayo leans over the bridge railing, rocking gently with the bridge itself. Below him, the river flickers and glints in the night shadows. The spruces and cypresses whisper to themselves on either bank.

He got more bad news today.

"I don't care what I have to do," Tamayo says quietly. "Whatever it takes."

Jack unfurls a single vine and touches the back of Tamayo's wrist. What he usually says at this point in these conversations is _you can do it_ and _I know you can_. And he still, always, believes both those statements. But now he asks, or starts to, "What if you can't...."

"No!"

Tamayo scowls at him so fiercely, his entire body contorting, that Jack yanks back the tendril and withdraws a little further.

Sagging, muttering apologies, Tamayo grips the railing. He takes a deep breath and says, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't yell, especially not at you."

"It's all right."

"It's _not_ all right, so just let me apologize, would you?"

Jack stays quiet. He watches Tamayo tug at his hair, scratch his ear, shift his weight from foot to foot. Animals move so much; he'll never cease being taken aback by that. Taken aback and disturbed, honestly. So wasteful, so extravagant.

"I need to do something," Tamayo says at last.

"All right."

"Fucked if I know _what_."

Jack droops, feeling the dark and the gravity acutely, dragging at him, shutting him down.

***

The idea Tamayo comes up with is terrible. Unexpected, terrible, and unworkable.

"I'm going to get in touch with Puno. He's so famous, he can totally help."

He looks hopeful as he says this, eyebrows up, eyes wide, but the longer Jack is silent, the more Tamayo tips up his chin defiantly.

"What?" Tamayo demands.

"I didn't say anything."

"Exactly! Which says _a ton_ , actually. Says everything."

"Really?"

"Yes!"

"So what did you hear?" He catches himself and adds, "Think you heard."

"Disapproval," Tamayo replies. "Thundering, massive disapproval. Maybe even some disappointment mixed in there."

"Anything else?"

"Hold on, I'm thinking..." Frowning, he scratches behind his ear, bites his lip. "Mostly disapproval, that's what I'm getting. You think it's a stupid idea. You think I'm stupid for —"

"I don't think you're stupid," Jack puts in as quickly as he can. "That's not fair."

"You think this plan is stupid, though."

"Doesn't matter what I think."

Tamayo shakes his head. "Of course it does. It always —"

Jack cuts him off. "If you're so sure Puno can help, get in touch with him."

"But —"

Jack stays quiet. Tamayo gets himself into these twists, talking himself into something he doesn't want to do, then flailing around, hoping against hope that someone will fish him out and tell him he doesn't have to do whatever it is.

Most of the time, Jack is more than happy to fish Tamayo out and give him that permission.

When it comes to Puno, however, he's a lot more reluctant.

***

At fifteen, Tamayo had kissed a few people before Puno, but Puno was the first boy he felt something for. They kissed every chance they got, behind the school, in the middle of the common, at concerts and in the museum. Upstairs from Puno's parents' tailor shop, down in the root cellar of Tamayo's aunt's cabin.

Puno was half a head taller than Tamayo, golden-skinned rather than ruddy chestnut, angular and graceful where Tamayo was round and enthusiastic. He excelled at sport and music, playing center on three teams and first chair in the youth orchestra. When he touched Tamayo with those callused fingertips, he probably could have made Tamayo do anything he asked. He certainly tried.

Puno was a liar, manipulative and off-handedly cruel. Those traits, Tamayo simply couldn't, or wouldn't, acknowledge. He was already thrilled every moment he was around Puno, so the exhilaration of being dared to steal from the workshop or commissary felt like more of the same, rather than any serious fear. Puno regularly got him to do his literature homework. Once, he had Tamayo write him a speech that won a three-moon speaking contest, then went on the prize trip with his cousin rather than Tamayo. ("You'd just be embarrassing," he told Tamayo, apologetically, as if Tamayo's social awkwardness was something that distressed him. "You're so clingy and excitable.")

This was the first time Tamayo liked someone more than Jack and wanted to spend time with him, not Jack. "You can come along," Tamayo would half-heartedly suggest every now and then. "Why don't you come with me?"

In response, Jack drew in on himself, twisted and wound tightly until he was nearly as hard as a pebble.

"Fine," Tamayo said, then huffed out his breath. "You're the one making it difficult, you know."

"Am not," Jack muttered, too quietly for anyone else to hear. "He is." Even more quietly, he added, then felt a thrill at his own bald honesty, "I hate him."

He'd never felt this before. Before he met Tamayo, he'd felt occasionally curious, but mostly indifferent, about humans. Now that he knew Tamayo, for whom he felt enormous affection and trust, it was as if he'd been opened up to other, equally confusing emotions. 

***

Tamayo is convinced that this is the plan that will work. Puno's famous, after all, an idol for millions across the megacol and moons. If he says something positive about Zellenmeer, they'll listen. Some of those will come, and some might stay.

He's not running odds on this, of course. For one thing, he's not very good with probability and the like, and he wouldn't even know where to start. For another thing, he wouldn't want to start talking like Zoot and Laina. It's far too late for him to start thinking at the macro scale of statistics and projections.

First, he has to figure out how to find Puno. Puno moved off Zellenmeer when they were seventeen; they'd already been estranged then for several months. His family isn't here any longer, either, aside from one second cousin.

That cousin is not exactly one of Tamayo's favorite people. She's curt and distant, rarely shows up for community meetings, only pays her resident fees on third notice, and used to complain about the noise the kids made at school.

"Hi!" Tamayo finds her as she's just sitting down at one of the communal tables in the commissary. He hands her a small loaf, wrapped in festive waxed paper. "For you."

She looks both taken aback and suspicious. "What is it?"

He slings a leg over the bench, only asking, "all right if I sit?" when he's halfway down, then continues, "I was making a batch of sugarbean cakes when I remembered how much you liked them."

"Hm."

"Yeah!" He leans forward, placing his chin in his hand. "You probably don't recall, but you'd make them for Puno — remember Puno?"

The three lines between her eyebrows deepen sharply. "Why wouldn't I?"

"I was his buddy there for a while, you know, and you —"

"As I recall, you haven't been 'his buddy' for quite some time, Tamayo Méndez." The way she pronounces his name, she might as well be saying 'lethal exposure' or 'fatal disease'.

Tamayo swallows and widens his grin, determined not to let the past get to him. "Kids! We were kids, we both made mistakes."

"Indeed." She presses her lips together in a line and for a moment he honestly worries she'll never speak again.

"Right, so there I was, whomping up sugarbean batter when it occurred to me that you'd probably like some." He nudges the package closer to her. "And here we are."

"Thank you," she replies and takes up her utensils. Not looking up from her meal, she adds, "I take it that's all?"

"We-ell," he admits, rocking back and forth. "Maybe we could catch up, too! I mean, it's been an age."

She neatly slices up her cutlet, then daubs each piece with the same amount of sauce before she responds. "I can't imagine what there is to catch up on."

"But —" he starts.

"After all," she continues over him, "this is quite a small community. I believe I'm fully up to date on your activities, both official and personal."

"Personal?"

She glances at him. "A small community. We know everything about each other."

"I don't think that's entirely true," he says. 

"Oh?"

"For instance, just as an example, completely off the top of my head —" He coughs into his hand, squares his shoulders, grins again. "How's Puno? What's he up to these days? Heard from him?"

She stabs a piece of food and eats it, chewing methodically. She is, he suspects, enjoying making him wait. 

"There are any number of media-streams available at the Info Hub," she tells him when she's good and ready. "I recommend checking the latest gossip and celebrity streams."

He pushes on. "I'm asking as a personal —"

"Personal _what?_ " she asks. "You're no longer friends. You haven't been friends since the disciplinary hearing."

"But —"

"So far as I'm concerned," she continues — how does she _do_ that? Just keep talking over him so smoothly? He's usually much better at conversation than this. "You're better off without him, always have been."

That's...not what he'd expected. At all. "Excuse me?"

"My cousin is handsome and charming," she says, "always has been. Magnetic, some say. He's also a nasty, manipulative little shit. You were smart to get out when you did."

"Oh," Tamayo says faintly.

"I don't know what's brought on this bout of nostalgia," she says, and touches the loaf he gave her, "but my advice is to get it out of your system some other way."

For a moment, Tamayo wants to put his head down on the table and just sleep. In the short time this conversation has lasted, he has moved from exuberance to paranoid discomfort into whatever this feeling is. Exhaustion, it feels like. Utterly drained.

"It isn't nostalgia," he tells her. "I need him to talk up Zellenmeer. That way we'll get some new residents and be able to continue."

"Oh." Her lips return to that thin, forbidding line. Eventually, she says, "he won't do that."

"You don't know, I could talk to him —"

"As persuasively as you've talked to me?" she asks, but gentles the barb, slightly, with a tight smile. "As persuasively as you've courted the Veeregheans?"

"That wasn't all my fault," he mutters. His cheeks are hot; the back of his neck, afire. "They —"

"They insulted Jack," she puts in. He must look surprised at that, because she adds, "I said it's a small community. It is."

"They did insult Jack," he agrees. "But I don't think they were ever serious about moving, either."

"Well," she says, pushing away her plate. "We'll never know, will we?" Before he can protest — he wants to protest, he needs to defend himself — she shakes her head. "It's all right. You made the right call with them."

 _That's_ an even bigger surprise than what she'd said about Puno. "You think so?"

She nods. "If they don't try and respect someone like Jack, they're never going to like it here."

He doesn't know what to say. He rubs his chin, enjoying the texture of his beard, as he digests her words.

"I don't envy you your task," she adds.

"Thanks."

"Nor do I hold out much hope for this place."

He snorts and gives her a weak smile. "Great to have your confidence."

"It's not you," she says, rising and taking her plate with her. "No one else would even try, after all."

***

When he visits the Info Hub, as she'd suggested, Tamayo gets another unpleasant surprise. There's already a curated stream for news about Puno, including a sub-current for him in relation to Zellenmeer. 

Tamayo hasn't kept up with Puno's career. Puno's kind of music was never his thing, plus the few times he has gotten the urge to look Puno up, he's been quickly overwhelmed by just how much there is about him to sort through. It's endless, ever-accumulating: Fans' footage of concerts, candid shots as he arrives at different spaceports, professional images of him dining out with other idols or supporting this charitable cause and that new release. Short holo-motion clips of him making a pouty face or winking or rubbing his bare chest turn up in the oddest contexts, like commentary on parliamentary records and bills of lading for public works projects.

The curated stream in the hub is less confusing, but also more disappointing. Puno's comments over the years regarding his home world range from "ugh, next question" to "shitty backwater moon", "the last place I'd want to be", and "benighted shithole". A few reporters have visited Zellenmeer in order to add local color to their profiles of Puno. Their judgments are about as positive as his: "one of those places you'd swear time forgot, but not in a good way" and "if the citizens aren't close-minded zealots cosplaying Druids, they might as well be".

Heat prickles up, angry and sharp, all over Tamayo's face and chest. He shoots off several impassioned denials and counterarguments — all delivered in a hoarse whisper, because the Info Hub is a designated Quiet Area — without checking the dates on what he's disputing. When one message is answered by someone saying _old newz lol_ , he knows he ought to be embarrassed, but he's too angry.

He needs to use this energy, he knows. He must convert it into something useful and productive, however, not simply let it make him bitter and contentious. He can accomplish that much on his own, after all.

He sends a slightly calmer message to Puno's public address. He has to avert his eyes from the bit of screen showing how he looks — if he stops to get gussied up, he'll never come back and get this over with — and keeps his voice low, his tone friendly.

"Hey, Puno, long time no...whatever," he says, and coughs. "Zellenmeer's going through a pretty rough time at the moment, dunno if you've heard. You — just you, man, all you — could make a huge difference if you just talked us up, maybe? Dropped some nice references to us? Hell, come back here, do a big concert, I don't want to tell you how to do your job but —"

The transmitter light starts blinking, indicating that he's running out of paid time.

"— miss you!" A lie, but he smiles big and wide. "Really could use your help, let me know!" Realizing that sounds too optimistic, he gulps and adds hurriedly, "thank you please help."

He feels like shit afterward. All the confidence he'd had in this plan goes suddenly gauzy — delicate and easily torn, floating away even as he sits there in the Info Hub staring at his own stupid face. What was he thinking? He doesn't want to see Puno, but that's the least of his doubts. What's really getting to him is how _bad_ and malformed an idea this was. He never should have pinned his hopes on one person, particularly not Puno.

***

There are three months left before the next general council meeting. The regional governor, Premier Ixora, will visit Zellenmeer and the other unaffiliated moons in the coming weeks.

Tamayo isn't sleeping very much. His normally hoarse voice has become raspy, occasionally difficult to understand.

Jack sticks close to him. Other than that, he doesn't know what to do. Tamayo occasionally snaps at him for hovering fretfully, but then apologizes within the hour.

When the information about the governor's visit arrives, Tamayo seems exhilarated.

"I've got to do something. Something I've never tried before. Something _amazing_." He pauses from striding around his small cabin and puts his hands on his hips. "Amazing!"

Jack crouches inside the delicate sprout snaking from the nut of a syrup-fruit in a cup of water on a windowsill. "Like what?"

Tamayo grins, then scowls. "Hell if I know!"

"Oh. I thought you were leading up to a big announcement." Jack tries not to sound disappointed.

"I thought I was, too." Tamayo scratches his cheek and frowns. "Thought it would come to me just when I needed it to."

"It didn't."

"No," Tamayo says, then sighs. "No, it did not."

The excitement drains from him visibly. Jack despairs.

***

The first time Jack saw Tamayo this forlorn and heartbroken, it was just after the fight with Puno.

The boys had gotten their hands on some pyrotechnic jelly. When you slathered it on your hand, then forcefully brought your hand into contact with something else, colored sparks flew. They were clapping, doing intricate hand shakes, snapping their fingers, dancing in the showers of sparks.

Tamayo was overjoyed — head thrown back, laughter streaming — his hands a blur as he tried every possible method he could think of to get more sparks. Back then, he was easy to please: give him company he loved and something bright and fun, and he was soon delighted, if not outright transported.

That's still the case, only there hasn't been much to delight him in recent years.

But that night, he was jubilant. Grabbing Puno's hands, dancing in messy circles with him, clapping hard over Puno's head and kissing him in the bright cloud of sparks. 

While Puno pushed him against a tree and lavished kisses down Tamayo's neck, the glitter sank, dispersed, winked out. When Puno pulled away, it was dark and Tamayo was gasping.

"Do it," Puno said. "Dare you."

"No," Tamayo said. "Not that."

Puno slapped the trunk of the tree, just beside Tamayo's head. Green and purple sparks burst out.

"I know he's here," Puno said. "He's always watching you."

"He's my _friend_."

"He loves you," Puno said. "He wants you all for himself. It's so gross and wrong."

Tamayo shook his head fiercely, tears glinting on his eyelashes. "It's not like that!"

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah," Tamayo said. "It isn't."

"Prove it, then."

Tamayo drew a deep breath. "Not like this."

Puno leaned in, one hand on Tamayo's shoulder, the other curling fingers into the bark. When he spoke, his tone was still flirtatious, only with an edge to it. "Do it, or I will."

"Puno, no!" Tamayo pushed him but Puno didn't budge.

Puno looked up into the lacework of branches and foliage. "Hey, dryad!"

The leaves whispered.

Puno stepped back, shouting again as he turned in a circle. "Fucking green weirdo! Come out, come out! Tamayo needs you, he's hurt!"

"I'm okay!" Tamayo called, voice hitching in desperation. "Don't listen to —"

The space between two branches dropped to the ground, twisted on itself, then stretched apart into a person-shape. It brightened, acquiring vague features, a mouth that opened. "What do you want?"

"Jack!" Tamayo shouted. "I'm okay, get out —"

Puno stood between them and his smile tilted, sharpened. "Wanna play, dryad?"

"No," Jack said and drew himself up taller. His worry throbbed at the front of Tamayo's mind, spreading like mold. 

"Too bad —" Puno coated his hands in the jelly and tossed aside the container. He rubbed them together, little sparks hovering, as he approached Jack. "I wanna see what happens..."

Jack swelled and towered. His worry flipped into _rage_ and a vine whipped out, snapping through the air, going for Puno's throat. Tamayo threw himself forward, shouting, stumbling, trying to get between them.

Puno just laughed and taunted Jack with sparks. "More where that came from! Got matches right here. What do you think happens if you get all greased up and someone just..." He snapped his fingers and a tiny flame spat up. "Oops?"

"Don't," Tamayo told Jack. "Don't —"

He couldn't let Jack hurt a human.

But, even more, he couldn't let anyone hurt Jack.

Tamayo barreled into Puno, catching him around the waist, knocking him down, and knelt atop him, pummeling him until his hands ached. Jack tugged him off, then vanished as people arrived in the clearing.

Tamayo was breathing heavily, weeping as he hyperventilated.

At the community disciplinary hearing, Puno claimed that Jack had attacked him without warning. Tamayo maintained that he'd gotten angry at Puno threatening Jack; he was careful not to mention what he'd felt from Jack. No one needed to know what Jack might be capable of.

They were both lying, avoiding difficult and incriminating truths, but since neither would change his story, the council punished them equally.

Puno moved away the next spring.

***

The night before Premier Ixora's visit, Tamayo does not attend the clean-up and decorating party. He climbs into the forest instead; a few old ladies watch him go and whisper among themselves.

He's entirely sober, so sad that he cannot think much beyond the words _I hate this; I'm a failure_. He has failed himself and his world.

Jack meets him at the other end of the rickety, swaying rope bridge. He doesn't say anything as he twines himself up Tamayo's arm and loosely around his neck. Like he used to, like old times.

Tamayo climbs a little farther up before turning sharply into the undergrowth. He finds an old spot he hasn't visited in years, a person-sized hollow between a tree's roots and a vertical stretch of rock. He wedges himself in, then tips his head back against the tree and sighs.

Above them, past all the greenery, through the enveloping outer leaves, there are stars shining and dark, empty spaces waiting. He's crying now, his sinuses filling and throat aching, eyes stinging and nose dripping.

Jack brushes away the fall of tears. It's almost like being licked and Tamayo shivers.

"Sorry," Jack whispers.

"Don't be."

Tamayo turns toward Jack's touch, pressing his wet cheek against the rough bark. His eyelashes are bunched together by tears; the whites of his eyes are startlingly crimson. He sniffs and burrows a little closer into Jack.

Jack stretches, expands from vine to body, until he's larger than Tamayo, something like an overcoat, wrapping himself around Tamayo and squeezing. He smells like new growth and old, lost litterfall.

"Why didn't we...?" Tamayo murmurs. He strokes the nap of Jack's surface, moss and fiddleheads overlapping each other. His touch makes Jack's fronds tremble and _reach_ , elongating, seeking more contact. "We've never..."

Jack can't answer that. _It's not like that! Don't make it gross!_ , Tamayo had screamed at Puno, and so Jack assumed that was true.

"I love you," Jack says instead.

Tamayo sniffs, wet and loud, and chuckles hoarsely. "You have terrible taste."

"No," Jack says. Two vines unwind and touch Tamayo's tear-slick cheeks. Smaller tendrils curl up and stroke at Tamayo's lips until they part. His tongue darts out, touching each tendril in turn, then together, and the contact surges through everything Jack is and can be. He is suddenly mighty and overwhelming, a towering elder. More tendrils sprout and curl, join their fellows and plait together until he and Tamayo are kissing like their lives depend on it.

Each tendril's tip splits and flowers inside Tamayo's mouth. Tiny petals brush his palate, his tongue, the back of his throat; his saliva runs full and fast. He's hungry now, as hungry as he is sorrowful, and exhilarated to boot. Jack has him pinned against the tree, covered with a heavy layer of living, trembling, _curious_ lichen and moss and ferns. It touches him everywhere, slipping under his clothes, pushing-then-ripping fabric out of its way, chasing more contact, greater reach.

"Jack —" He tries to sit up and pull off his shirt, but it's hanging off him already, split from collar to hem. He fumbles at his trousers, but two fiddleheads push his hands away and tug the fly open, then his cock out. "You don't have to, I mean —"

Jack is everywhere, inside his mind and atop/around him, and his amusement quakes through Tamayo. "I want to."

Tamayo goes to reply, opens his mouth, but they're kissing again — or he's sucking Jack off? It's both but also something else entirely — as the fiddleheads wrap around his cock and squeeze. Others spread his legs, hold him open, and catch his arms above his head. Small stalks, soft petals, explore his inner thighs, weigh and stroke his balls, push further back.

Jack's green joy keeps exploding inside Tamayo's mind, joining his own arousal, mixing with it, so he's moaning almost constantly. 

"Let me in," Jack whispers and engulfs the head of Tamayo's dick with a large flower. The petals tighten to squeeze, then slide, as the smaller ferns keep jacking his shaft.

"In," Tamayo replies and thrusts up, into tissues softer than skin, slick with his sweat, sweet-smelling and clinging. "Please."

He's fucking into Jack's grasp, with his tongue, his dick, but he's also surrounded and captured, engulfed by these creaking vines and smothered by the mat of growth. It's inside him now, too, a bulb probing at his ass, gradually swelling, and he wills himself more open for it. 

Jack tastes Tamayo everywhere, feels his rough calluses and slick inner skin, twists around him and tries to get closer, closer. Pollen bursts irregularly from his surfaces, then hangs in messy clouds around them, mixing with the puffs of green volatiles exploding off him. 

He doesn't understand urgency, but he understands desire and need, and they rule him now. Tamayo moans and pants and sweats in his hold, streaked with pollen and small scratches from inadvertent thorns, and he's never been more beautiful.

Tamayo's fingers flex and he clutches at Jack, shuddering around the stalk in his ass, sucking hard on the one in his mouth. He'll shake apart. He _wants_ to. He wants nothing more.

They're in green time together, endlessly unfurling, growing in new directions, recycling and renewing. Tamayo's orgasms punctuate the time but don't determine it. Jack holds and touches, explores and penetrates, and they keep on, and on.

***

Who can say why we love those we love? We know what we love about them, but can anyone truly explain _why_ this person and not that one, why now, but not before, why love has faded or grown. We can enumerate whom we love and what lovable qualities they possess, but it's nearly impossible to say _why_. 

There's no inductive reasoning with love.

Jack and Tamayo loved each other almost immediately, with that fervent certainty of childhood, that conviction that is as inexplicable as it is strong. 

When the teachers, then the elders, then the council tried to take Jack out of Tamayo's hands, Tamayo wailed and fought. Jack spit pollen and sharp, malformed strobili.

 _Why?_ they all wanted to know. They demanded that Tamayo explain his tantrum. _Why are you so attached to a fucking **plant**?_

They would have demanded the same of Jack, but no one other than Tamayo and his aunt believed — yet — in his sentience. (Yet they already distrusted him, and it, and his potential. No one ever said superstition was logical.)

Tamayo sobbed, then stopped and went still. His eyes were glassy, his chin dimpled. "He's my friend."

"Surely we're not going to end a child's friendship?" his aunt asked. Her words were mild, but her voice was frosty and her fingers dug into Tamayo's shoulder. Jack scrunched further down inside Tamayo's collar.

The teacher, the elders, the councilors, all stepped back around this moment. They resented his aunt's intervention, as much as they had, previously, respected her role in the community.

"He's not hurting anyone," Tamayo said. "He's just different."

That was the first time that Jack, at least, understood that difference was frequently associated with threat and harm.

"If you take him away, though —" Tamayo never got to finish that statement. Jack pinched him with a thorny stalk and his aunt shook him quiet.

"Leave the child be," his aunt told the other adults. "They're got each other. A harmless friendship should be the least of our worries just now."

Even then, external change, Zellenmeer's decline, was all but assured.

It's only now, deep in the forest, below starlight and shadow, entwined and sunk into each other, that both Jack and Tamayo understand just how right she got it all those years ago.


End file.
